Too much knowledge?

[Sleep]

This is something that I've wondered long and hard about as I've studied complex concepts for hours on end.

I'm only 18 yet my knowledge is quite extensive (I've more or less been studying some new concept every day for the past five years). I'm worried though, does the knowledge an INTP acquires eventually get lost in his/her vast interconnected web of ideas?


The way I think and (so I've read) other INTPs think is to build a massive mental construct of theories, facts, ideas, etc. Then, when a new idea is encountered, it is instantly added to the construct and thus the INTP doesn't have to learn so much -- it seems to come "intuitively" because in effect, most of the knowledge from said idea has already been learned in the past through previous studies (everything is interconnected in some way).

So basically I'm pretty worried that all these ideas and details will become lost to me. How can one person remember so much? I'm only 18 yet I almost already feel my mental capacity nearing the brim of my theoretical mind-glass.
Have you guys ever thought about this/are any of you old enough to offer first hand experience?

 

[Radioactive_Springtime]

I "wracke de disciprine" so I don't think I'll ever really get that far

 

[Ermine]

This is something that I've wondered long and hard about as I've studied complex concepts for hours on end.

I'm only 18 yet my knowledge is quite extensive (I've more or less been studying some new concept every day for the past five years). I'm worried though, does the knowledge an INTP acquires eventually get lost in his/her vast interconnected web of ideas?


The way I think and (so I've read) other INTPs think is to build a massive mental construct of theories, facts, ideas, etc. Then, when a new idea is encountered, it is instantly added to the construct and thus the INTP doesn't have to learn so much -- it seems to come "intuitively" because in effect, most of the knowledge from said idea has already been learned in the past through previous studies (everything is interconnected in some way).

So basically I'm pretty worried that all these ideas and details will become lost to me. How can one person remember so much? I'm only 18 yet I almost already feel my mental capacity nearing the brim of my theoretical mind-glass.
Have you guys ever thought about this/are any of you old enough to offer first hand experience?

The mind is an amazing thing. I just find it annoying how I always remember the information, but never the source. Whenever I somehow amaze someone with my arsenal of knowledge, they always ask how I knew. I usually say I read or heard it somewhere. I can never remember where!

And that's the biggest reason why I fear old age. Above all else, I want my brain, especially, hands, and legs to be unencumbered until I die. Of course you can't depends on that. There's alzheimers (I shudder at the thought), parkinson's, arthritis, all sorts of stuff to thwart that goal.

And there's also the possibility of only being a young prodigy, and going downhill after 30. I want to keep progressing forever.

 

[loveofreason]

Welcome bborps!

I found a cure for the vast amounts of information I used to store; for my ceaseless attendance of workshops, courses, lectures; for my browsing of bookstores and absorption in weighty tomes of knowledge; for my endless hours pondering and integrating every new piece of data into the grand schemata of everything.

I had children.

Wiped me clean. Not a straw of mental structure left. I can barely maintain a mind-map of how to get from bed to the bathroom in the dark.


More seriously, I don't see cause for worry, even though you may feel near overflowing. The tendency to subsume information and make it part of the mind-body is a healthy process. Maybe it frightens the INTP when the data disappears from the manageable, pliant realm to become part of the sub-strata, no longer near conscious retrieval, but this disappearance doesn't herald loss. The knowledge just starts working deeper, more automatically, more intuitively, as you note in the OP. And it no longer takes up all the conscious space in a way that has you feeling overwhelmed with information.

As the intuitive 'body' develops and strengthens, the individual can learn to integrate knowledge with a minimum of thought involved. Perhaps one becomes more skilled at filling in the missing bits, only focusing on that which supplies the information necessary to bridge gaps in knowledge. After all, isn't redundancy a waste of space?

 

[Wisp]

Besides, if you need the knowledge, it will (usually) pop up.

 

[Jesin]

Ooh! I have a link for this, too!
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak

 

[Aphasia]

I usually can't remember things when I want to (exams =.="), but knowledge will pour out whenever I'm in certain situations and I go into 'computer' mode (once in an emergency involving someone else's head and copious bleeding). I don't worry much about knowledge, I just forget it and remember it when the time comes. Don't underestimate the capacity of the brain to store, process and use info. Besides, if you forget about a topic, you can always look it up (all hail google, lord and master of net users).

 

[Oblivious]

The brain is an analogous, holographic computer. In contrast to the digital discrete ones we are operating.

If you want to remember names, find out the meaning behind them and how they are associated with their respective ideas. This approach does not lend itself well to all concepts, which is why I am mostly good at remembering technical terms or names that are bywords. Like Hitler, Stalin, 1942, Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Father Gapon.

 

[Aphasia]

I don't remember names well, but I remember faces. I've even forgotten the names of my siblings before.

 

[CowSavior]

Welcome bborps!

I found a cure for the vast amounts of information I used to store; for my ceaseless attendance of workshops, courses, lectures; for my browsing of bookstores and absorption in weighty tomes of knowledge; for my endless hours pondering and integrating every new piece of data into the grand schemata of everything.

I had children.

Wiped me clean. Not a straw of mental structure left. I can barely maintain a mind-map of how to get from bed to the bathroom in the dark.


More seriously, I don't see cause for worry, even though you may feel near overflowing. The tendency to subsume information and make it part of the mind-body is a healthy process. Maybe it frightens the INTP when the data disappears from the manageable, pliant realm to become part of the sub-strata, no longer near conscious retrieval, but this disappearance doesn't herald loss. The knowledge just starts working deeper, more automatically, more intuitively, as you note in the OP. And it no longer takes up all the conscious space in a way that has you feeling overwhelmed with information.

As the intuitive 'body' develops and strengthens, the individual can learn to integrate knowledge with a minimum of thought involved. Perhaps one becomes more skilled at filling in the missing bits, only focusing on that which supplies the information necessary to bridge gaps in knowledge. After all, isn't redundancy a waste of space?

I don't think everybody wants to give birth...
Or have kids at all...

 

[Wisp]

But is this not the human goal from a biological standpoint?

 

[Oblivious]

My goal is to one day hook my brain up to the internet and to become more than human.

 

[Ermine]

Yeah, maybe put a USB drive in everyone's head? That would be interesting, possibly catastrophic.

 

[Privateer]

A brain full of chain-email and porn? No, thanks.

 

[mm1991]

Ditto Privateer.

 

[Olba]

Yeah, maybe put a USB drive in everyone's head? That would be interesting, possibly catastrophic.

Yo, hook me up once you actually get a drive big enough to fit all the info in a brain to it. You know, that would something like a few petabytes of data, probably more. After all, humans read lots of books and gain other information, along with memories and all the nice extras. Plus the fact that we don't actually actively use most of the stuff we remember because we are too stupid to do so.

Anyways, I think that once you had a USB drive large enough to fit a brain in, you will have yourself a PC with a CPU with, say, 10 cores, each running at something like 2Ghz, hundreds of petabytes of HDD, probably around half a tera of RAM and other cool stuff.

Not that you even had a way of translating all of the electric waves to data in the first place. Well, not like we need one, we can just gather random data from people from the day they are born to the day they die and then archive all of their knowledge into some secret basement in Siberia, waiting for the communists to take advantage of it in their project to unite all world as a single nation.

 

[Jesin]

Meh. The human brain is too weird for its capacity to be measured in anything like bytes. It takes shortcuts. It obviously uses lossy compression, but we don't know enough about it yet to know if it uses anything methodical enough to be called a compression algorithm. Some of the information is actually stored in the way it's wired together; it rewires parts of itself constantly.

You can't measure its processing power the same way you measure CPU speed, either. Operations per second? What does "processor cycle" mean to that lump of gooey stuff anyway?

 

[Ermine]

It could be possible if people could find out how to convert brain signals to something that a computer can understand. Brain signals are basically pulses of electricity, right?

However, I doubt people would even try because so much could possibly be lost in the conversion process (in the way that some things on a Windows won't transfer correctly to a Mac), and it could possibly result in anything from death and permanent brain damage to the loss of a memory or aphasia, or something. Any of these would make mankind too afraid to start.

 

[Jesin]

It could be possible if people could find out how to convert brain signals to something that a computer can understand. Brain signals are basically pulses of electricity, right?

Yes, they are sent as electrical pulses, but no, it isn't that simple. The same pattern of pulses will "mean" different things to different parts of the brain, so it matters not only what message the nerves are carrying but also which nerves are carrying the message.

However, I doubt people would even try because so much could possibly be lost in the conversion process (in the way that some things on a Windows won't transfer correctly to a Mac),

No, not in the same way. Anything you can store on a Windows machine, you could store on a Mac; you just couldn't necessarily do anything with it in the other OS. Seriously, you could just take the binary data, wrap it in file headers that tell the other OS not to try doing anything to the data, and transfer it. Both systems represent data in fundamentally the same way. In fact, you can store any data from any traditional computer on anything that can represent a large enough number.

The brain has more than one way of storing information. Like I said, it even stores some information by forming, breaking, strengthening, or weakening connections between neurons. So in order to keep all the details of the information stored in the brain, we would also have to store information about the shape of the person's memory and the configuration of the cells within it.

 

[Linsejko]

Jesin, I loved that article, read it when it first came out. One of the best written WIRED articles I've ever read.

Oblivious, did you mean "analog" instead of "analogous"?

To all-
The brain appears to just fold over and expand itself the more information you put into it. Also, there is lots of data that says the more you use it, (the more mentally active you are), the less chance there is of you getting Alzheimers/Dementia (and related) diseases.

I remember I used to wonder if I would forget everything I knew on piano, because I felt like I had memorized so much I could barely have it all- yet it was all always there.

I think that our consciousness is equivcable to a desktop- when we feel like we have everything we can, that just means our screen is full, even though the harddrive shows much more than we can focus (put on screen) at any given time.

To follow that analogy, it seems that the longer/more often you pull something up on screen, the fresher the data stored is, the longer it appears to be stored, and the easier it is to retrieve.

.L